The term “polycrisis” gained popularity in 2022 to describe the experience of many worldwide who found themselves coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, only to be thrown into a cost-of-living crisis caused by high energy prices and inflation. This was accompanied by emerging armed conflicts (such as the war in Ukraine and Gaza), geopolitical conflicts, and increasingly frequent extreme weather events. At the end of 2022, the quick acceleration of artificial intelligence added further disruption to the polycrisis.

The Cascade Institute notes, “A global polycrisis occurs when crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects. These interacting crises produce harms greater than the sum of those the crises would produce in isolation, were their host systems not so deeply interconnected.” Richard Heinberg states: “Our current set of crises can be described as a polycrisis because self-reinforcing feedbacks between ecological and social breakdown are strengthening and growing more numerous. For example, climate-driven human migration challenges political systems while eroding traditional cultural norms that support environmental stewardship. Societies amid social crisis, and ones turning toward authoritarian regimes, can seldom muster efforts toward resource conservation, emissions reduction, and habitat preservation; indeed, under such circumstances, past efforts in these directions may be undermined.”

Fig. 1: An illustration of the overlapping and interconnected crises that markt eh polycrisis

We already know that individual and collective mindsets (how people understand the world around them) are deeply influenced by crises. However, this complex mix of disruptions is creating an even more “inconvenient mind” for people in societies around the world. In these liquid times, engaging with audiences using assumptions from the past is, in the best case, pointless and, in the worst case, harmful. Understanding and rethinking how we campaign on the climate crisis in this rapidly evolving context is crucial.

More people than ever experience the impacts of the Climate Crisis first-hand. In a March 2023 study, 61% of US citizens had seen their community impacted by climate change, and in a survey of people who moved to the US in 2022, 30% said it was due to climate change. While not surveyed, we can assume that around the world, the proportion of people experiencing extreme weather has reached significant numbers in most countries.

In almost all countries, most people think climate change is a primary or existential challenge for humankind. However, the percentage of people who believe that if we do not act now, we fail future generations dropped from 75% in 2021 to 62% in 2023. Climate change has only ranked sixth out of seven of the most critical worries for people globally for many years. In July 2023, it placed seventh on the worry scale as people’s lives became dominated by new concerns, from the pandemic to the cost of living crisis. While a majority still thinks that environmental objectives are more important than economic growth, the number of people who believe we can sacrifice the environment for economic growth has increased for the past three years.

Yet even if people consider climate change a significant threat, climate concern does not automatically translate into support for climate policies or personal behaviour change. Although usually more impacted by climate change, people with lower levels of income are less concerned about climate change than those with higher incomes. In India and some European countries, we have even seen a significant increase in climate scepticism, with people no longer believing climate change is man-made.

Although more and more people have had first-hand experiences of climate impacts, the media regularly reports on severe weather events, and the IPCC, scientists, and activists continue to paint a picture of the bleak future that awaits us if we don’t act; people are disengaging with ‘climate’ around the world. What is going on? What can we do better? These are the questions at the centre of this second part of the Exhausted Mind.

When climate activists look at global worry trends, they see their issue sliding down the importance scale. Given the ranking of worries, they often assume that new concerns are outcompeting old ones. This view builds on the idea that our working memory can only process a maximum of four things at a time. This leads them to believe one would need to portray the climate crisis as more relevant than other crises. However, this view is wrong, and psychology clearly shows that new worries do not offset old concerns. Instead, they accumulate.

Emotionally, unresolved fears build up, leading to anxiety, depression and stress. A person’s attitude towards worry and emotional resilience determines how much concern we can hold before it impacts our psychological health, day-to-day functionality and physical health.

It becomes more complicated for people if public narratives create mental conflicts between their worries, such as pitching economic concerns against environmental worries, claiming that money can only be spent on one of them.

A person who worries about both issues and wants both to be resolved now struggles with the conflicting idea that both are impossible and they need to prioritise. This cognitive dissonance creates additional stress, and while people may prioritise one over the other, the deprioritised worry does not simply vanish.

FEAR, ANXIETY AND WORRY

Fear is an emotion designed to help us in a life-threatening situation, but it can also be maladaptive if something harmless triggers or persists after the danger has passed. For example, being afraid of driving or crossing the road after having experienced a car crash.

Anxiety is a broader term that encompasses the emotional and physiological components of worry and stress response. Anxiety is a normal reaction to a perceived threat or uncertainty and can motivate you to prepare for a challenging situation or avoid potential harm. However, when anxiety is excessive, persistent, or out of proportion to the problem, it can cause significant distress and impairment in various areas of life. For example, frequent panic attacks, avoidance of social situations, or having obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours.

Worry is the cognitive component of anxiety. It involves negative thoughts and predictions that are often unrealistic or exaggerated. Worry can cause mild distress but does not usually interfere with daily functioning. For example, you might worry about an upcoming exam but still be able to study and perform well.

At the end of July 2023, German psychologists warned that the polycrisis had exhausted the country’s people. This exhaustion can be seen worldwide and mainly derives from back-to-back crises, leaving no time for recovery. The increase in negative emotions, anger and stress worldwide and a global mental health crisis are clear signs of this exhaustion.

This crisis-driven exhaustion is strongly connected to the uncertainty created by the polycrisis. While people hold different tolerance levels for uncertainty, for many, the polycrisis has breached their emotional limit due to the magnitude of threats and the breadth and endurance of uncertainty. In August 2023, the Anger Monitor survey in six European countries found uncertainty was the leading cause of anger. Today’s exhaustion is caused by three energy-draining cognitive processes: anxiety, grief and change.

Faced with uncertainty and the multiple threats caused by various crises, people naturally respond with fear and anxiety. Fear is a feeling to visit for a while; it can motivate lifestyle changes or political action. However, if people stay fearful for too long or can’t stop the cause of their fear, the feeling becomes exhausting.

In today’s polycrisis, none of the disruptions are resolved, resulting in decreased trust in the system and enhanced feelings of vulnerability and powerlessness. COVID is still around, and a new aggressive variant could emerge; our health system remains vulnerable. Inflation might ease, but the economic system appears increasingly unstable. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza drag on, and the geopolitical system has become increasingly volatile. What was stable has become liquid. The solid ground on which we could experience our daily worries has become quicksand.

In this environment where problems are not solved but merely patched up, more and more people, especially the youth, are suffering from anxiety. While heavily publicly debated in Europe, Australia and the US, it is not a rich world phenomenon. Researchers measuring the anxiety levels of 16 and 24-year-olds in 10 countries found that together with Australia, India, the Philippines, Nigeria and Brazil had the highest anxiety levels. In the Polycrisis, anxiety is not simply a mental health problem but a meaningful mental response. We must learn how to handle such emotions before they become so draining that they impact sleep and psychological- and physical health.

While few people would consider themself grieving, psychologically, the emotional process many are going through right now is grief. Grieving is the process of letting go of something we hold dearly; this could be our security due to looming wars, health threats and social unrest. It could be letting go of long-held plans or dreams of prosperity and convenience due to decreasing economic stabilities or alternative lifestyle choices to help adapt to climate change. It could be the environment or world we are used to and love or having to let go of our identity, threatened by the need to migrate or increasing numbers of migrants.

Fig. 2: An illustration of the Grief Cycle from Jusika Martinez

Different losses are more significant for different people, fragmenting societies into different tribes. Some worry about the end of the month (the economic crisis), while others worry about the end of the world (the climate crisis). As humans, we strongly prioritise loss aversion over gains, so dealing with these multiple losses will be one of the most important forces shaping our mindsets.

Common to all traumatic loss is that people need to go through a cycle of grieving to come out on the other side.

While the traditional so-called grief cycle (see Figure 2) is inadequate to fully describe the dynamics of grief in the polycrisis, it gives a good overview of the different individual and collective emotions people feel throughout the process. In the polycrisis, people would rather transit back and forth through these emotions or even hold multiple emotions simultaneously.

Even without crises, change in human societies is constantly accelerating, driven by technological development and its sociological implications. The pace of change that today’s humans have to adapt to is far more extensive than ever, and the polycrisis has forced people to make even more changes to their lives. Humans do not like change as it forces us to switch off the autopilot (our habits and beliefs) and think consciously, which costs energy. If we have to make more conscious decisions, be it because we want to save money in the supermarket, change to a more climate- friendly lifestyle or find ways to engage with AI, we are exhausted. Being forced to make many decisions while feeling unfit to make good choices once more creates or increases anxiety, and anxiety itself makes decision-making much harder.

One way our mind helps us deal with mental and emotional exhaustion is denial. As already outlined in part one of The Inconvenient Mind, denial is a natural defence mechanism humans use to handle unpleasant emotions like fear, guilt, shame or grief. It should not be mistaken for politically motivated climate denial, as it requires different communication strategies. Politically motivated climate denial builds on disinformation and could, without emotional denial, be tackled by providing the correct information. However, if people are in emotional denial, information is filtered by strong confirmation bias; people only hear what they want to hear. If they can not modulate the facts to fit their denial, they shoot the messenger, meaning they react aggressively and dismiss the source of information.

Denial can come in many forms and narratives. The most common form is “we can’t do everything at once”. Other examples are “We can’t afford it right now”, “We need to change, but not now”, “There’s not much we can do anyway,” or “Enough is enough; give us a break”. This denial can also mingle with other beliefs, resulting in “climate change exists, but it is not man-made.”

Uncertainty and living in a permanent crisis have eroded people’s trust in institutions and left them feeling increasingly powerless.

The Anger Monitor showed that powerlessness is not only related to politics; large fractions of society also feel they don’t have power over their personal lives. While political power is driven by the opportunities the political system creates, personal powerlessness is largely driven by the economic system. This feeling of personal powerlessness drives the build-up of toxic anger in societies.

Fig 3: The personal and political power of different anger types from the Anger Monitor. Power is the difference between people who agree or disagree with statements indicating political or personal power. Toxic anger groups (Supremacy, Rogue and Vengeful) have the lowest personal power in all countries.

Therefore, It is essential to address personal disempowerment aside from political empowerment (only creating participatory democracies will not solve the problem). One also needs to distinguish “real helplessness” (systemic structures that take power from people), ‘learned helplessness’ (a mindset developed out of repeated experience or the combination of experience and social norms), and ‘self disempowerment’ or power denial (the often convenient assumption that one can not do anything). Elites often amplify Learned helplessness and self-disempowerment to maintain political control over citizens. To reduce powerlessness, these three forms require different strategies (see part 2 of the Exhausted Mind).

Inflation has proven to be politically destabilising. We can expect that in democracies, political power will change more often, adding havoc to policy consistency and investment security.

When denial and powerlessness take root in societies, anti-environmental organisations and agitators have an easy play to convince their audiences that climate action is unnecessary economic suicide and that environmentalists are the real enemy or even terrorists. Telling people what they want to hear is the core business of populists, even if they don’t have a specific opinion on climate.

Weaponising climate change is increasingly used to sustain power or challenge political power, while climate activists become the next object of anger and hate in the culture war.
In the UK, when responding to the question, “Which groups or people do you feel most anger towards?” 31% chose Climate Activists. This is higher than the number who blame migrants in the same survey. No wonder the Convervative party discovered rejection of climate action as a promising election campaign.

If the above mechanisms of exhaustion and denial weren’t enough, two other processes also challenge any sustainable transition. For decades, environmental organisations have struggled to put climate and energy issues at the centre of the public debate. When it finally happened in the second decade of the 21st century, many activists saw the Paris Agreement, Fridays for Future, and the massive public attention and debate that IPCC reports created as breakthrough moments. However, when an issue takes centre stage, the increased information flow increases knowing and a ‘feeling of knowing’ as well as the creation of opinions and confirmation biases.

In times of social media and alternative realities, public debates naturally lead to a fragmentation of views. Fragmentation further worsens polarisation, especially when weaponised by social media and demagogues. The more popular an issue gets, the more politicians must consider public sentiment when creating and enforcing policies. Fragmented and polarised societies show lesser resilience and ability to respond to crises – another polycrisis feedback loop.

On top of this, in the wake of the polycrisis, societal mindsets shift from abundance (we can all get more wealthy together as we have plenty of resources) to scarcity mindsets (what somebody else gets will impact my well-being negatively). Research shows that people with a scarcity mindset can empathise less and prioritise short-term over long-term thinking. Scarcity mindsets again reduce our collective cognitive capacities by increasing competition, recklessness, and hyperfixation.